Are your customers seeing what they expect
- Posted August 18, 2008 at 10:06 am
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On the weekend I took the kids camping. As a kid growing up we went camping a lot and my kids of course see lots of camping on TV shows so although they haven’t camped much there are certain things they expect. The kids expect a tent, a campfire, no blackberry, rover or lake to swim in, marshmallows, and chips.
The question you have to ask yourself when you look at your blog or sales pages is the same thing.
What do your customers expect to see on your site or blog?
Sure there are the givens, probably Adsense, which people are kind of blind to, banner ads, some kind of header image, so do you give these to people? Are they optimized to your niche? How about including the following:
- Other news sites or articles in the niche
- On Target ads that the customer will want to see
- Resources for the common user in the niche
- Conversational tone instead of leading hype filled copy
Sometimes as I am rolling through blogs to try to find out what is happening I do find things that people have on their site that through optimization or laziness should not be there.
- Off niche ads
- Off niche links
- Lots of AdSense ads
- Non Flowing site design (most niches have their own look try to copy it somewhat)
When you are doing this kind of research on your own sites as well as other within your niche to make sure that you are looking right it is also a good idea to make notes of the advertizers that they are promoting. I have found many smaller advertisers that are great to use as they are really focussed and often not something I would look at.
On the other hand if you have a hunting site it is probably of no use to your readers to have ads for a well publicized diet or contact lenses. All people may need these things but your readers are reading your content for the information pertaining to the niche not to their general lifestyle. You want to advertise exactly what the site is leading toward as this is why the people are on your site in the first place.
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very good post, the worst thing you can do for yourself is to have a site where someone needs to swim through thousands of Adsense ads to get to the content/payoff!
Relevancy is definitely the key when it comes to blogging or for that matter anything related to internet marketing. As you say, your readers are already in expectation mode when they come to your blog so if they don’t see what they were expecting they will just click away.
Couldn’t agree more regarding the critical nature of proper targeting. I see so many sites with split messages and traffic leaks that it makes you scratch your head. As you mention, proper and sufficient research cannot be overstated.